Dark Specter

17

Kristine Kjarstad was in tears when Steve Warren brought in the fax. Oh fuck, he thought, wondering if it was too late to “eclipse himself,” as his mother used to say. She had a load of oddball expressions like that. People thought everything had been easy for Steve, that he’d been born with a plastic spoon in his mouth. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

His mother was a war bride with whom his father had spent a pleasant few days during the liberation of Paris and then returned after the armistice to discover, as he put it, that “there were two Battles of the Bulge, and we lost the second one.” The result was Steve’s oldest brother, George, with an optional s, who was born a few weeks after their marriage. Three months later, the newlyweds arrived back in Dick Warren’s hometown of Aberdeen, a logging community on the Washington coast.

The first month they were there, it rained nonstop for twenty-three days. Shortly afterward, Francoise (“Frankie”) Warren had the first of her spaz attacks. These took a variety of forms, all of them frighteningly unpredictable, from appearing at a wedding in what looked like a strapless nightgown and no bra, to serving dinner guests a boiled pig’s head with the snout and ears still on.

Steve’s siblings had dealt with this by copping out and acting weird themselves. Georges, who now insisted not only on this spelling but also the pronunciation that went with it, was a mainstay of the Blue Moon Tavern in the U District, where he gave recitations of his poetry. Annie lived in a cabin on Vashon Island, communing with the womanspirit of Puget Sound and “invoking her intercession for our sins against the environment.”

Only Steve had possessed the grit and guts to transcend his unconventional upbringing and seize the lackluster prizes which life has to offer those who do OK: a tract home in Bellevue he’d still be paying off when he was a hundred and ten, a car he could never find in a crowded parking lot because it looked just like all the others, a wife who could walk into a strange mall and locate the Hallmark store in seconds. Some men are born to mediocrity, some have it thrust upon them. Steve Warren was one of the very few who achieve it by their own unaided efforts. Despite the almost overwhelming handicap posed by his home environment, he could look back on his life and tell himself proudly, “I did it their way.”

As a result, he felt he had the right to demand the same high standards of others, and Kristine Kjarstad had never let him down before. She could be a little snippy at times, yes, but he’d never seen her in tears.

“You all right?” he said, trying for the New Man image, concerned but not wimpy, like one of those sporty house-husbands you saw jogging around Green Lake with the baby.

“All right?” she snapped, pretending to blow her nose so that she could dab the tears away. “Sure, I’m just fine. I just got through phoning the prosecutor in the Selleck case to tell him we can’t proceed after all.”

Steve Warren dimly recalled the case she was talking about, some fourteen-year-old who’d been raped while walking home from her aunt’s house. The victim had named a local kid who denied the charges, claiming that he had keen drinking with friends at the time. The friends had corroborated his alibi, but Kristine Kjarstad had been sure they would back off once the forensic results came through.

“You mean the tests showed it wasn’t him?” Steve asked in a solicitous tone.

“The tests never got done!” Kristine exclaimed. “They’ve got a backlog of hundreds of cases down at the labs. Nothing gets processed until a trial date is set. Meanwhile the swab we took from the victim’s vagina gets stored in a fridge down in the basement, right? A few months ago there’s a power failure, and pretty soon you’ve got a couple of dozen samples of assorted bodily fluids turning green, growing legs and heading back to the farm. Result, the suspect’s alibi will stand. We know he raped a fourteen-year-old, and he knows we know. And he’s going to get away with it, and there’s not a fucking thing that anyone can do. All right? Sure, I’m just fine. No problem.”

She passed a hand through her wavy brown hair and gave a long sigh.

“So what’s new with you?”

Steve Warren held up the fax.

“This just came through from SPD. I took a look at it and …”

He broke off. The whole idea suddenly seemed flaky, maybe even slightly wacko. What if he told Kristine, and she looked at him and said, “Are you feeling all right?” Steve took several deep breaths, trying to control this crise de nerd, as his mother used to say. It was so hard to be normal all the time!

“Yes?” said Kristine Kjarstad pointedly.

“Well, I just, see, OK, like, the thing is …”

“Are you feeling all right?”

Steve Warren dropped the fax on her desk.

“Just read it,” he said, and walked out.

Kristine skimmed through the fax, wondering what had produced this rare glimpse of spontaneity in a droid like Steve Warren. The fax was a standard request for a criminal record search, commonly known as a D and B after the credit check agency, Dun and Bradstreet. This one had originated in Atlanta, Georgia, and was made out in the name of Dale Watson, a.k.a. John Flaxman. It had been sent to the Seattle Police Department, and they had routinely copied it to the King County force, whose territory surrounds the city on three sides.

Neither of the names meant anything to Kristine, but she dutifully went down to the basement and ran through the files to see if there were any rap sheets lying around from before her time. There weren’t, but on her way back she finally spotted the detail which had provoked her partner’s personality attack. It was in the section dealing with the crime itself. Kristine had skipped this first time around, having discovered that it was a street incident of no interest, the kind of thing she imagined happening all the time in places like Atlanta.

Now, trapped in an elevator which stopped at every floor, she read it through out of sheer boredom. Two sentences leaped out at her: “Subject was armed with a.22 Smith amp; Wesson revolver, as was his accomplice. They were also carrying a case with religious literature, a video camera, several sets of handcuffs and a roll of tape.”

The covering note from SPD was signed Don Krylo. Thirty seconds after she got back to her desk, Kristine had him on the phone. Krylo, a harassed-sounding sergeant in Central Homicide, was delighted when Kristine offered to deal direct with the original source of inquiry.

“You got a contact name?” she asked.

“I’ll need to look it up. Let me call you back.”

“I’ll hold.”

If she let Krylo go, she’d probably never hear another thing. While she waited, Kristine tried to get a firm grip on herself. She’d only just succeeded in putting the Renton case behind her. The last thing she needed was to open up that can of worms again to no purpose.

“Here we go,” said Don Krylo. “Guy’s name is Wingate. Lamont Wingate, Homicide Task Force, Atlanta City Police.”

“Great.”

“You think you got something on this guy?”

“I don’t know. I need to check it out a little. It’s tough for us here in the county. You know how it is, Don. We make a mistake, everyone starts cracking jokes about hayseed sheriff departments.”

Krylo, who had probably made more than a few himself, indignantly denied the possibility.

“It’s just this is the second CRS we’ve received in this name,” he said. “Both out-of-state, too. I thought maybe you might know why this guy’s such a celebrity.”

Kristine Kjarstad felt her heart racing. She took a deep breath.

“This is the second one?”

“That’s what it says here. There’s a reference number to the other request, but I don’t have it right-”

“Could you look it up?”

Her tone was eager, almost peremptory.

“I guess. Might take a little time. You wouldn’t believe the mess we’ve-”

“I’ll call you back in fifteen minutes, Don. That give you long enough? This is kind of urgent.”

“It is?”

Don Krylo sounded as though he suspected that something was maybe getting away from him here. Kristine tittered girlishly.

“No, I just mean I’m going out to lunch, right? And I’d like to get this wrapped up first. You know how it is,” she finished lamely.

“No kidding,” Krylo replied in the tone of a man who knew only too well how it was. “Catch you in fifteen.”

Kristine put down the phone with a shaky hand. Fifteen minutes to fill. A thought had occurred to her while she was talking to Don Krylo, but for a moment she couldn’t track it down. Then she remembered that she’d been meaning to call Paul Merlowitz. Her lie about going out to lunch had jogged her memory.

The original idea had been to pass on the information about the Wallis house. Paul was the perfect networker for a deal like this, with a ton of contacts all over the country. If anyone could find a short-term tenant with a kid Thomas’s age, it was him. The problem was that Paul had this thing for her, and if she phoned him he would think she was coming on to him and she’d have to deal with the consequences of that.

In fact it was more than just a thing: he’d practically proposed to her. A lawyer’s proposal, phrased in such a way that if she turned him down, as she had, he could make it look like he’d never made a firm offer in the first place. Nevertheless, they both knew what had happened. She’d expected him to drop her after that. God knows he wasn’t short of other possibilities.

It wasn’t that she didn’t like Paul, in a way. But there were problems. For one thing, she didn’t want to end up as some hotshot lawyer’s trophy wife. For another, she didn’t feel physically attracted to him, or not enough to make the difference. And then there was his work. They had met in court, a case in which she had appeared as a prosecution witness of a man charged with the murder of his business partner plus his wife, child and mother-in-law who were all in the house when it burned down.

As Merlowitz had privately admitted to her after the acquittal, there was no question that his client was “guilty as fuck.” But he got him off by stacking the jury, working the ethnic angle-the accused was Korean-and plugging away at inconsistencies in the prosecution case and irregularities in the police investigation. None of these had the slightest bearing on the basic facts of the case, but they were enough to persuade at least one member of the carefully chosen jury that the accused’s guilt had not been proven beyond all reasonable doubt.

Kristine had never tried to tackle Merlowitz about the morality of what he was doing. She knew exactly what line he would take: every citizen has the right to the best defense money could buy, better let ten guilty men go free than convict one innocent one, etc., etc. She acknowledged the force of these arguments, just as she acknowledged the need for a nuclear defense capability, but that didn’t mean that she wanted to marry a B-52 pilot. Nor could she imagine letting into her life a man who earned obscene amounts of money dreaming up ways to free someone he himself admitted was guilty of a callous, premeditated murder.

Nevertheless, expediency won out in the end. Kristine had her principles, but she knew there was also a gray area where she could be bought. Whether or not she managed to come up with a vacation playmate for Thomas, she would certainly get a fabulous lunch. And if Paul Merlowitz didn’t come up to her exacting standards, there wasn’t anyone else around at the moment who did. She lifted the receiver and dialed.

After all her agonizing, Merlowitz wasn’t taking calls. Instead, she got to speak with a secretary who ran through a whole repertoire of moves from the elaborate tai chi of commercial intercourse, concluding with the statement that Mr. Merlowitz was “in conference.” Kristine left a message, and immediately regretted it. Now she would be waiting, if only subconsciously, for the phone to ring. Merlowitz had her on a string. She should have hung up and called again at her leisure, instead of handing him that power.

Only ten minutes had gone by, but she called the Seattle Police back anyway. Not only was Don Krylo there, he had the information she’d requested.

“I was kind of doubtful for a while,” he told her. “We’re going on-line here and everything’s ass over tit, whole boxloads of stuff I could put my hand on a week ago’ve just like, you know, disappeared. Watch it be one of those, I told myself, either that or someone’s circular filed the damn thing. Anyway, looks like you lucked out. The previous CRS on this guy originated in-you got a pen? — Evanston, Illinois. Detective Eileen McCann’s the name right here on the docket.”

“Right. And thanks for coming up with this so quickly. I sure appreciate it.”

“Hey, that’s what we’re here for! Your tax dollars at work.”

“Have a great one, Don.”

“You too.”

Kristine Kjarstad lay back in her chair and closed her eyes. Her breath came irregularly, in spasms. It was almost like being in labor again. She called the switchboard and got the numbers of the Atlanta and Evanston City Police, and then a kind of paralysis descended on her. Every time she dialed, she found herself setting the receiver down the moment the ringing tone began. This was the moment of truth. The whole edifice she had constructed in her mind was either about to be revealed as a delusion, or not. It was hard to say which prospect she found more disturbing.

Finally she just steeled herself and dialed the Evanston number. She discovered that Eileen McCann did in fact exist-for some reason even this had seemed doubtful-but that she was “away from her desk.”

“My name is Kristine Kjarstad. I’m with King County Police, in Washington State. It’s about a suspect named Dale Watson. Could you please have her call me?”

Once again, Kristine found herself in the classic female position of waiting helplessly for the phone to ring. She was just about to call Atlanta when it did.

“Kristine? Paul Merlowitz.”

“Oh! Oh, hi. Hi, Paul.”

“You called.”

“Right. I did, yeah.”

“So how you been?”

“Good. You?”

“Good.”

“Good. The thing is, you caught me at kind of a bad moment, I’m expecting a call, but I was wondering, maybe could we get together sometime? The thing is … It’s kind of difficult to explain on the … There’s this house …”

“Thursday any good for you?”

“Thursday? That’s …”

“Or I could do Tuesday next week. We’re talking lunch, right?”

“That sounds …”

“The Painted Table, Thursday, noon, OK?”

“OK.”

“Great to hear you, Kristine.”

The line went dead. But the moment she put the phone down, it started to ring again.

“Hello?”

“Am I speaking with Officer Carstad?”

It was a woman with shoulder pads built into her voice and a crisp, pedantic delivery.

“That’s right.”

“This is Detective Eileen McCann, Evanston City Police. I understand you have information concerning our inquiry with regard to an individual named Dale Watson.”

“I may have.”

There was a pointed silence at the other end.

“And when will you be sure?”

Kristine Kjarstad took a deep breath. This was clearly going to be one of those calls.

“I’d like to know a little more about the present status of the case,” she replied.

The Evanston detective sniffed audibly.

“The basic information is on the inquiry we sent. It is not the policy of this department to give out progress reports regarding ongoing investigations over the telephone.”

“Wait a minute!” Kristine snapped. “I don’t work for some tabloid TV show. Can’t you cut me a little slack here?”

“I repeat, it is not department policy to-”

Kristine cracked.

“OK, if you won’t talk, listen! The reason I’m calling is because I’ve received notice that a Dale Watson is currently being sought by another law enforcement agency in connection with a case which has certain resemblances to one on our files. Let me just run the outline past you. If it means nothing, go ahead and hang up. All right?”

“I’m listening.”

“Our case involves an apparently motiveless quadruple homicide. The attack took place in broad daylight at the family home. The victims were restrained with handcuffs, gagged with lengths of duct tape and shot at point-blank range in the back of the head. The weapon was a.22 handgun, probably a revolver, loaded with Stinger cartridges.”

She had spoken fast, the words gusted along on a tidal current of adrenaline and anger. Now she’d done, and sat tight, grasping the receiver tightly, probing the long silence at the other end.

“You are describing a crime which you currently have under investigation?” the Evanston detective inquired at last.

“Correct. And I know of at least one more.”

Another silence.

“Then I consider it expedient that we should meet up as soon as possible,” Eileen McCann pronounced at last.

Success went to Kristine’s head.

“Thursday any good for you?” she demanded. “Or I could do Tuesday next week. We’re talking lunch, right?”

“That’s logistically problematic,” was the unruffled reply.

“OK,” said Kristine, getting a grip on herself. “Fax me through details of your case, and if it looks like we’re on to something here I’ll get out there to see you within forty-eight hours. How’s that sound?”

“Let’s diarize.”

Whatever Eileen McCann lacked in charm, she made up for in efficiency. Twenty minutes later, Kristine had the entire dossier of the Maple Street shootings on her desk. She was still poring over it when Steve Warren appeared. He handed her a waxed cup filled with a creamy foam.

“Thought maybe you could use this,” he mumbled. “Double tail’s how you like it, right?”

Kristine barely looked up.

“Steve, you’re a fucking genius!”

Warren flinched. He didn’t deserve this! OK, so he’d screwed up earlier, but he’d tried to make it up to her, running over to the espresso stand and getting her a latte. There was no call for mockery.

“This thing has hair all over it!” Kristine exclaimed almost hysterically. “And if it hadn’t been for you, it would have passed us right by. No one else would have bothered to read those details about the MO that tie in with the Renton case.”

Steve Warren shrugged awkwardly.

“Hell, I’m just an average Joe …”

Kristine shook her head decisively.

“No, you’re not, Steve. You’re one of a kind.”

He looked at her as though she’d slapped his face, then turned without a word and walked out. Kristine shook her head and returned to her reading. She kind of liked Steve, but there was no getting away from the fact that the guy was a total fruitcake.

It took her another thirty minutes to get a clear fix on the Evanston case. As soon as she had, she called Atlanta. At first it seemed that she was in for another round of the old crapola with some dickette who’d flunked out of charm school, but the woman who answered the phone turned out to be merely a call catcher. Detective Wingate, she informed Kristine, wouldn’t be on duty for another three hours.

Kristine glanced at the clock. The idea of waiting seemed intolerable.

“Can you give me his home number?” she begged.

The steel magnolia replied that she was not authorized to give out such details, and offered instead to connect her to Wingate’s colleague, one Charlie Freeman. There was silence, then another ringing tone.

“Homicide,” said a male voice.

“Detective Freeman?”

“Yeah.”

“My name is Kristine Kjarstad, I’m a homicide detective working out of King County Headquarters in Seattle. You want to call me back, check my credentials?”

“That’s OK, ma’am, I know a cop when I hear one. Besides, this way it’s your nickel. What can we do for y’all?”

Freeman’s voice was deep, slow and sexy. Kristine found him easy to talk to. It remained to be seen whether the opposite was true.

“I’ve just seen a CRS from your Detective Wingate regarding an individual named Dale Watson. I was wondering if you could tell me a little more about that case.”

She braced herself for another bout of stonewalling, but Charlie Freeman apparently took a more relaxed view of his work than Eileen McCann.

“Sure. Not a whole lot to say, though. Two white guys go for a stroll in a black neighborhood, for some reason we don’t get. They meet up with three of the brothers and someone pulls a gun. One guy on either side gets dead and the white survivor is in IC. Half an inch to the left and he’s history too, the doc says.”

“And he’s Dale Watson?”

“No, Watson’s the one who got whacked. He was shacked up with a teenage runaway. We got the name from her, plus the idea he was maybe from Seattle, which is how come we faxed you guys. You got anything on him?”

“Not under that name. But we’ve got a case on the books which looks similar.”

Charlie Freeman sounded skeptical.

“You sure about this, ma’am? I have to say the incident here looks like one of those classic street things.”

“This guy in the hospital, have you got a name?”

“Booked himself in as John Flaxman at the hotel, but that don’t mean jackshit. He’s out of danger now, but he still won’t say a word about what they were doing that evening. Just lies there staring up at the ceiling.”

“Does he have any links to Seattle?”

“Not that we know of. I searched his hotel room, but he didn’t have no ID, no tickets, no nothing. These guys were stripped. All I found was a pile of clothes and some athletic shoes, could have been bought anywhere.”

“Athletic shoes?”

“That was his own stuff. They dressed up as holy rollers that night, see? Bought themselves the outfits right here in town.”

Kristine stared at the wall. It seemed to be moving, bulging in the center like a sail.

“What kind of athletic shoes were they?” she asked.

“Well, I don’t rightly recall, ma’am. Some kind basketball shoe. But this is a doozy whichever way you look at it. Take the hardware they went in with. You go looking for trouble in a neighborhood like that, you gotta pack enough gun. Now sure, a two-two can be a work of art, I got a couple at home, but out there on the streets you’re up against Uzis, Cobrays, you name it. The toddlers pack magnums in their diapers, even our guys are outgunned half the-”

“If we could just get back to the shoes for a moment …”

Freeman sighed.

“What can I tell you? They were standard basketball shoes, the kind all the kids wear.”

“What brand?”

Her tone was almost rudely abrupt. Charlie Freeman sounded taken aback.

“I don’t recollect, ma’am. What’s with the shoes, anyhow? They were black, far as I recall. Yeah, and there was some kind of logo, a little red outline. Some guy doing a slamdunk.”

“Was the brand Nike?”

“How’s that?” asked Freeman.

“N, I, K, E.”

“Is that how you say it? I always thought it rhymed with ‘Mike.’ Let me just look up my report here. Yeah, that’s right. Nike Air Jordan. You sure it’s spoke like that? Sounds kind of weird.”

Kristine Kjarstad let out a long, slow breath.

“That’s because it’s a Greek name, Mr. Freeman. Nike was the goddess of victory.”

“Well, hey, learn something new every day. Nike, huh? So who was she? Some kind of feminist?”

“Just a woman who hated to lose. You’re talking to another. One more thing. Were there traces of paint on the soles of the shoes?”

This time there was a lengthy silence.

“Now you come to mention it,” Freeman replied in a different tone, “I think there was something on them. I figured it was bubblegum or some-”

“Because it was pink, right?” Kristine interrupted.

Another long silence.

“Now how in hell did you know that?” asked Charlie Freeman quietly.

“I’ll tell you when I get there.”

“You’re coming down south?”

“Correct. I’ll call you back once I have my reservation. I’ll want you to set up an interview with this guy in the hospital. Make it as long as possible. I plan to go to work on him, and I don’t want the doctors getting in the way. This is our one chance to crack this case. It may be the last we ever get.”

“But I told you already, he refuses to say a goddamn-”

“I think he’ll talk to me, Mr. Freeman. I’m pretty sure I can get him to talk to me.”